Truong Tran’s work seems to me to be part of a literary undertaking that has both sociological and aesthetic implications. Tran is advancing the interrelated questions of narration, historiography, and identity and establishing something new. dust and conscience speaks from a cultural position that resists both marginalization and assimilation. The refusal to be displaced or to be incorporated is at the heart of the genre-bending evident in the work—it explains why the writing is, and must be, simultaneously prose and poetry, story and lyric. Something extremely important is going on, something wonderful.